“We need to put commuting on equal footing with migration in any conversation on worker mobility, since it is no longer a case of either/or” argues CASI Visiting Scholar S. Chandrasekhar in the latest India in Transition (IiT) piece. Chandrasekhar is an Associate Professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) and has worked extensively on labor mobility. In the article, he presents data and case studies which convincingly demonstrate the massive growth of the commuter population in India. Read the full article.

Read more about Chandrasekhar’s research on his website and attend his lecture at CASI on November 14. Details about the event will be posted soon here.

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CASI Director Devesh Kapur and doctoral student Ananth Padmanabhan discuss the growing problem of “hate crimes” against out of state migrants in India in a recent guest column in Business Standard. They discuss the tension between the idea of common Indian citizenship and preferential “sons of the soil” policies and provide some suggestions for how to provide better protection for migrants from the Northeast who face harassment. Read the article here.

Prior to 2014, India witnessed seven consecutive elections (1989 to 2009) in which no single party won a majority of seats in the Lok Sabha, resulting in minority governments, including unwieldy minority coalitions, dependent on external support (Sridharan, 2012, for details).

With the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) winning a majority in the 2014 election, and continuing the trend by seizing two states, Maharashtra and Haryana from the Congress in the October 2014 assembly elections, the question arises as to whether coalition politics is still important. To our mind, the answer is an unambiguous yes; pre-electoral coalitions were important for the BJP’s majority in the Lok Sabha, a post-electoral coalition is necessary in Maharashtra, and alliance-building will be for the future in terms of passing legislation and expanding the party’s reach.

The Importance of Pre-electoral Coalitions in 2014

In contemporary Indian politics, the incentive for national parties to form pre-electoral coalitions are straightforward. Given India’s first-past-the-post electoral system, the aggregation of votes at the constituency level is vital for winning seats. By implication, given the breakdown of the national party system into distinct state party systems, the formation of alliances with parties commanding a significant state-level vote share helps to aggregate constituency-level vote shares in states where one’s own party is not strong enough to go it alone. Hence, pre-electoral coalitions have the potential of increasing the number of seats won although they come at the expense of conceding a certain number of seats to allies, and also including such allies in a post-election government.

The underlying principle is that a third party could: leverage expected vote share in states where it is perceived to be a significant third party with a potentially ‘ bridging vote share’ i.e. perceived pivotality for electoral victory helps it to form electoral coalitions with the first or second parties in the states in which it is allocated more seats to contest than in the previous elections (Sridharan, 2005:197)

The BJP, since 1989, has grown partly on the basis of its own ideological appeal and mobilization and partly by leveraging coalitions (Sridharan, 2005), while the Congress turned to coalitions with success in 2004 and 2009. (Sridharan, 2004).

The general finding on pre-electoral coalitions is that the seat-sharing ratio between partners tends to get stuck in a narrow band, and does not adjust smoothly according to the demands of a partner who perceives its popularity to be on the upswing. For example, both the Congress-NCP and BJP-Shiv Sena coalitions in Maharashtra, the BJP-Janata Dal (United) (JD(U))coalition in Bihar (until recently) and the BJP-Akali Dal coalition in Punjab, as well as the Left Front coalitions in West Bengal and Kerala, and the Congress-led UDF coalition in Kerala, all tended to remain stable in their seat-sharing ratios over the past two or more elections, with adjustments happening within a very narrow band (Sridharan, 2014, last chapter for details). It is only when old coalitions break down due to one partner demanding a substantial revision of terms, as in Maharashtra in October 2014 for both Congress-NCP and BJP-Shiv Sena coalitions, and new coalitions are formed that new ratios can be established.

In 2014, the BJP struck a range of new alliances, most of them on more favourable terms than in the past while retaining its key old alliances (Shiv Sena, Akali Dal) on status quo terms. Thus, in 2014 the BJP forged pre-electoral alliances in 10 states (Table 1) compared to 6 alliances in 2009 in which both it and its partner(s) contested seats, of which 7 were new alliances – Bihar, erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Haryana, Kerala, Meghalaya and UP – and defined by more favourable terms.

While the BJP has won 282 seats, a majority of the 543 elected in the Lok Sabha, it has formed a surplus majority NDA government with its pre-electoral coalition partners, taking the tally up to 334 seats. However, the question arises as to the stability of the BJP’s majority is in future elections and, by extension, the continuing relevance of coalitions.

Of the 282 seats won by the BJP, as many as 57 seats are accounted for by states in which the BJP depended significantly on coalition partners (not counting UP where the Apna Dal was a minor ally). These are Maharashtra (23 seats), Bihar (22), Haryana (7), Andhra Pradesh (2), Punjab (2), Tamil Nadu (1 ). Now, even if we assume that two-thirds of these 57 seats would have been won by the BJP contesting alone, this would still leave it 19 seats short of its present total and short of a majority. Hence, the BJP’s majority in 2014 was crucially dependent on vote transfer from its pre-electoral allies, much like the CPI(M)’s majority in the West Bengal assembly in the past depended importantly on vote transfer from other Left Front allies.

The Rajya Sabha and the Continuing Importance of Coalition Politics for the BJP-led NDA Government

Leaving aside the importance of pre-electoral coalitions, the centrality of coalition politics will remain due to the NDA’s dependence on opposition parties beyond the coalition to pass legislation in the Rajya Sabha. At present, the BJP has only 43 members in the 245-seat Rajya Sabha, and just 57 with its NDA allies, well short of the halfway mark of 123. Even if one makes highly favourable assumptions for the BJP in forthcoming state assembly elections through its term, including the October 2014 elections in Maharashtra and Haryana that the BJP won, and factors in upcoming Rajya Sabha vacancies, the NDA’s net gains would still make it fall short of the halfway mark for most, if not all, of its term in office.

The BJP’s Regionally Limited Presence and the Importance of Coalition Politics

Last but not least, coalition politics will remain important because the BJP’s stated objective is to expand its base outward from its current strongholds in the northern and central Hindi-belt states and the three western states. For this it will need allies in the other southern and eastern states except possibly in Karnataka and Assam. This is because the BJP’s narrow majority of 52% of Lok Sabha seats is very disproportionately based on an unprecedented sweep in the Hindi-speaking northern and central states and Union Territories and three western states and Union Territories. Of the BJP’s 282 seats, as many as 244, or 87%, came from this Hindi-belt plus western India stronghold, or in other words, it won a whopping 81% of the 304 seats in this region, or an even more whopping 92% of the seats contested (244 out of 266 contested) in this region based on a 44% vote share in this region. Replicating such a strike rate in future elections would be highly improbable. The BJP itself is aware of this fact, hence its realization that an expansion into the south and east will be necessary and will require either an improbable quantum jump in vote share, or more realistically, the formation of pre-electoral coalitions with regional party allies.

Conclusion

For these interlocking reasons coalition politics will remain important for governance and for the BJP’s electoral strategy over its term, at the Centre and in the states. BJP President Amit Shah’s recent statement in the aftermath of the heady victories in Maharashtra and Haryana that the era of coalition politics is over looks like an overstatement for the three reasons outlined in this article over the longer term.

Adnan Farooqui is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi and Eswaran Sridharan is the Academic Director of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India in New Delhi

“India’s unemployment rate currently sits at 9 percent. Yet, one in three citizens with at least a bachelor’s degree is out of work. Its working age population,is projected to rise from over 750 million today to almost a billion by 2020. At the same time, agricultural employment is in decline, accounting for less than 50 percent of total employment for the first time in Indian history. These market pressures are pushing the labor force towards higher skilled occupations. Yet, even young, college-educated,Indians often lack the requisite skills to obtain these jobs.” Continue reading..

Read more of CASI’s India in Transition (IiT) bi-weekly publications on the CASI website.

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Fall 2014 CASI Visiting Fellow, Rahul Pandita, is the author of this week’s India in Transition (IiT) article. He writes about the path towards reconciliation between the exiled Kashmiri Pandit community and Kashmir’s Muslim population.

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CASI has just published a working paper titled “Does Clientelism Work? A Test of Guessability in India,” written by Mark Schneider, a doctoral candidate in Political Science at Columbia University.

Central to the literature on clientelism is the assumption that low-level politicians are able to act as “brokers” between voters and higher-level politicians because they possess invaluable information on the partisan preferences in their area. These brokers are believed to be able to monitor votes and efficiently target benefits on a quid pro quo basis in their area because they possess fine-grained information about voters. In the working paper, Schneider challenges this assumption and introduces a behavioral measure- guessability– to test the degree to which local political elites (the “brokers”) can guess the partisan preferences of locals in their constituency. Based on data collected from nearly 1,000 voters and 100 sarpanches in seven districts throughout Rajasthan, Schneider’s research is a must-read for anyone who studies clientelism and targeted distribution in politics.

Preeti Mann, a professor in the School of Development Studies at Ambedkar University-Delhi, has written this week’s IiT piece. Mann provides an insightful anthropological perspective on the recent election using Mewat district in Haryana as an example. She discusses the barriers that the Aam Admi Party faced in getting a foothold in the region and circumventing local thondas (middlemen).

“Each thonda represents a certain vote bank: depending on his clout, he could influence more than two thousand votes. The web of associations between the thondas and the locals has created a fine network of political ties in the region. Due to this, there is hardly a free floating, independent or disassociated vote in Mewat.”